Cedric Johnson presents a collection of essays arguing that cities and society (particularly vulnerable members of society) suffer when public policies value property rights and privatization over the “common good” (p. xvii). The 12 diverse but well-linked chapters use the lens of the disaster and recovery of New Orleans after the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina to explore the dominance of neoliberal approaches to governance in order to explain for whom cities work and for whom they fail. The overwhelming consensus of the authors is that marginalized members of society—in New Orleans a largely African American population with few socioeconomic resources—are not well served by a government imbued with neoliberal policies. And they agree that policy choices, more than forces of nature, were to blame for the death, destruction, and suffering that New Orleans experienced.

Together, the essays in The Neoliberal Deluge provide readers with a thorough understanding of the definition of neoliberalism and neoliberal policies, essentially the view that “private institutions and individuals—not government—should bear primary responsibility for social welfare, education, and disaster preparedness, relief, and reconstruction” (p. xxiv). The book is divided into four sections covering local governance, urbanity, planning, and equality. In this essay, I summarize the discussion in a number of the chapters in order to motivate a reflection on the challenges faced by modern American cities and on the resources political scientists can bring to bear for understanding and solving these problems.

The essays in the governance section offer an overview of the ways in which neoliberalism operates in government and policymaking. For example, Chris Russill and Chad Lavin evaluate post-Katrina New Orleans using a framework developed by Eric Klinenberg—the sociology of disaster. The frame suggests that those who are worst-off in society suffer the most during a disaster, particularly when the government relies on private mechanisms for relief. Because private charitable contributions may be limited or nonexistent, those who lack access to the private goods necessary for relief or recovery will be excluded from both processes. As a result, the effects of disasters like Katrina are borne unequally. Geoffrey Whitehall and Johnson offer many illuminating examples of the privatization of social welfare, such as the development of privately funded settlements for Katrina survivors built outside of the city. The arguments in all three chapters are applicable far beyond the boundaries of New Orleans. A reliance on private institutions for social welfare may mean that some portion of those in need must forgo basic necessities and/or material comfort because of insufficient resources.

The three essays in the urbanity section focus on issues that challenge many cities: a tourist-focused economy, school reform, and public housing. Each author describes how neoliberalism has either generated the urban ill or come to be seen as the proper solution. For example, Paul Passavant details the ways in which public policies have facilitated the economic demise of cities. He argues, for instance, that the building of highways by the federal government allowed those with means to move out of the city and spurred the growth of suburban shopping malls and office parks (and thus suburban jobs), leading cities to search for ways to tax these outsiders. This, Passavant argues, explains the city's focus on tourism; an economic strategy that tends to bring endemically low-wage jobs, reinforce segregation, and orient infrastructure development away from residents and toward outsiders. “In important ways,” he continues, “state actions … helped to produce this landscape of inequality” (p. 95). John Arena's essay essentially asks why neoliberal policies persist despite their clear detriment to a substantial portion of the population. Arena chronicles the destruction of public housing in New Orleans. His essay seeks to explain why those in support of maintaining, rebuilding, and expanding public housing were unable to achieve their policy objectives. He concludes that the primary obstacle for the public housing movement was identity politics—the promotion of racial divisiveness at the expense of a consciousness of deep material inequality.

Again, all three chapters in this section offer arguments that reach beyond the case of New Orleans. Public policies in a great number of cities may contribute to racial and economic segregation, inequality, and urban decay; and reversing such policies likely requires a broad coalition that crosses economic and racial lines.

The three chapters in the planning section seek, in part, to explain how cities can mitigate the power of neoliberal thought. They are united by the conclusion that a commitment to inclusiveness in the planning process for such groups as minorities, women, the working class, and the poor is the most productive way to ensure that public goods, as well as public nuisances, are distributed without respect to race, gender, or class. For instance, Kanchana N. Ruwanpura's essay compares the outcomes and experience in New Orleans to the patterns in Sri Lanka following the 2008 tsunami. He highlights the ways in which inequalities in preexisting resource distribution, development patterns, and social arrangements lead to a situation in which disasters disproportionately burden weaker members of the community. He argues that awareness of such structural inequalities is necessary to prevent their recreation in the rebuilding process. The call for more democracy as an antidote to unequal policy outcomes is applicable not just to New Orleans or disaster recovery, and not even just to planning. It is conceivable that incorporating the needs and preferences of vulnerable members of society in all local policymaking would result in more equitable outcomes.

Finally, the three chapters in the inequality section analyze the ways in which neoliberal tenets and conservative views of poverty largely framed the discussion during and after the disaster and shaped policy responses in the short and long term. They also highlight the disproportionate misery endured by resource-poor individuals during the crisis, a situation, these authors argue, that results from preexisting social constructs and policy choices. As Avis Jones-Deweever explains, “in times of natural disaster, those groups who are most marginalized before tragedy strikes bear the brunt of the ill-effects during the disaster and long afterward. As a result, the on-the-ground impacts of natural disasters are anything but ‘natural’” (p. 300). Those most vulnerable to the storm were those with the fewest resources.

Jones-Deweever, like many of the authors in the book, indicates that such unequal outcomes might be lessened with aggressive government intervention. Public policies could ensure that those with few resources have similar outcomes to those with many resources. We might even extend this argument to policy areas beyond disaster assistance. It is plausible that public policies could seek to ensure equal outcomes with regard to housing, food security, health, schooling, and so on. Less clear is whether or not such policies can or should be the purview of local government and whether or not enough political support exists at any level of government to implement such policies. Answering these types of questions is the way in which political scientists studying local politics can contribute to our understanding of these issues and debates.

First, locally focused scholars might be able to provide causal evidence that preexisting inequalities were the result of policies passed by local, state, or federal governments. We need better evidence that public policies in general (and perhaps neoliberal policies in particular) are important contributors to segregation, economic inequality, and vulnerability. Second, we need to be able to rule out alternative explanations, for instance, that segregation is market driven. Equally important is a better understanding of why such policies were passed in the first place, what alternative policies might have looked like, and which options would have been politically feasible and which not. In the course of explaining why market-oriented policies are passed, it is possible that we could also determine whether or not it is necessarily the case that the valuation of privatization necessitates a devaluation of the common good.

Along these same lines, we need more evidence that a public approach to social welfare (as opposed to the private approach highlighted throughout the book) would provide better outcomes for those identified as faring poorly under the current paradigm. Doing so would require clever research designs and inevitably difficult (though not impossible) data collection–measuring outcomes under different types of policies. We also need better evidence that solutions like expanding democratic inclusiveness produce better outcomes for vulnerable populations in order to understand why these groups were excluded in the first place. For instance, we might be able to determine whether or not inviting poor residents to the planning table tends to generate fewer decisions that disrupt poor neighborhoods and also what the political obstacles are to expanding democratic access.

In sum, political scientists have the opportunity to eliminate alternative hypotheses and provide evidence of causal mechanisms so that we may develop and possibly implement solutions to urban crises where they exist, and prevent them where they do not.